David Sinclair, the Harvard geneticist, once told the public that data showed him more than two decades younger than his birth certificate. He was 49 at the time. His method, KFF Health News reported, was a daily regimen built around a molecule his own research had shown improved health and lengthened life in mice. Online he claimed the lungs, cholesterol levels and blood pressure of a “young adult” and the “heart rate of an athlete.”
There was a catch. Published research, the outlet noted, had not shown that the molecule works in people the way it works in mice.
Money and the lab bench
Sinclair also had a financial stake in the answer. KFF reported that he is named as inventor of a patent that Elysium Health licenses, whose NAD booster pills cost $60 a bottle, and that he invested in InsideTracker, the company he said had measured his age. Elysium advertised an exclusive license from Harvard and the Mayo Clinic, and its website named eight Nobel laureates plus 19 other prominent scientists to a scientific advisory board.
Some in the academy balked. Cambridge’s Milner Therapeutics Institute announced funding from Elysium in 2017, then quietly chose not to renew it after faculty complained that the institute was tied to an unproven supplement. Stephen O’Rahilly, who directs Cambridge’s Metabolic Research Laboratories, said selling supplements of unproven benefit is commonplace. What struck him as unusual was “the extent to which institutions and individuals from the highest levels of the academy have been co-opted to provide scientific credibility for a product whose benefits to human health are unproven.”
Jeffrey Flier, who once served as dean at Harvard Medical School, was equally direct. “There is financial incentive and inducement to overpromise before all the research is in,” he said. Felipe Sierra of the National Institute on Aging put his own view in a single line: “Why don’t I? Because I’m not a mouse.”
The skeptic from City of Hope
No scientist has pressed harder on Sinclair than Charles Brenner, a biochemist at City of Hope National Medical Center in Los Angeles, according to a Nautilus profile. Brenner has made a habit of dismantling longevity claims on Twitter, on YouTube and at conferences, where he is introduced as the “longevity skeptic.” At one investors’ conference in Switzerland he went through the proposed therapies one by one and told the room that aging cannot be stopped. He compares believing in a rewritten manual for human lifespan to “believing in the tooth fairy.”
Brenner is no outsider to the chemistry. In 2003 he found the pathway by which nicotinamide riboside, or NR, produces NAD, the molecule that powers cellular machinery. He serves as chief scientific advisor to ChromaDex, a company that markets supplements for healthy aging, so Nautilus asked the obvious question about whether scientists tied to supplement firms deserve trust. At best, Brenner says, therapies can keep older people healthier and out of hospital.
The disagreement is partly about money. Nautilus noted forecasts that longevity-startup investment would reach $600 billion within three years, up from $40 billion. Richard Miller, a University of Michigan biogerontologist who runs one of three NIH-funded labs testing anti-aging compounds on mice, offered the sober alternative to a sales pitch: the “long, laborious, slogging process of actually doing research.”
Sources
- A Fountain Of Youth Pill? Sure, If You're A Mouse. (KFF Health News)
- The Longevity Skeptic (Nautilus)
